Onion Taken Seriously, Film at 11

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Onion Taken Seriously, Film at 11

The article in the Beijing Evening News told a shocking story of American hubris: Congress was behaving like a petulant baseball team and threatening to bolt Washington, D.C., unless it got a new, modern Capitol building, complete with retractable roof.

There was a problem with the story. Rather than do his own original reporting, Evening News writer Huang Ke had cribbed, nearly word for word, his text from an American publication. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Ke hadn't bothered to vet the source he had plagiarized: The Onion.

At first, the Evening News stood by its story, demanding proof it wasn't true. It finally did apologize, but stubbornly tried to deflect blame for having been duped.

It wrote: "Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them with the aim of making money."

Carol Kolb, the editor of The Onion, the satirical publication that bills itself as "America's Finest News Source," jokes that the Evening News might not have been too far off-base with its defense.

"That's what we do at The Onion," she laughs. "We do print lies to make money."

The case of the Evening News taking The Onion seriously is but Kolb's favorite example of something that happens constantly.

"People every single day think The Onion stories are real," says Kolb.

She cites another example. In September 2002, The Onion ran a piece called, "Al-Qaida Allegedly Engaging in Telemarketing." The piece told of the terrorist organization's nefarious plan to raise funds through various phone scams. It also showed screenshots of a videotape the CIA had uncovered in which al-Qaida's second in command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, is seen with a headset, presumably tricking an unsuspecting victim.

"We had known about al-Qaida's practice of raising money through drug trafficking and money laundering, but it seems the full scope of their depravity had barely been imagined," the story fictitiously quoted CIA Director George Tenet saying.

The regular Onion reader likely read the story, laughed and moved on. But to those unfamiliar with The Onion, such stories can be alarming.

Thus, upon seeing the story, the Branch County sheriff's department in Coldwater, Michigan, which had been investigating telemarketing scams targeting the elderly, issued an urgent press release.

"In the course of this investigation, it was learned that this is going on throughout the United States, and some of these telemarketing programs are believed to be operated by al-Qaida," the release stated. "The CIA has announced that they acquired a videotape showing al-Qaida members making phone solicitations for vacation home rentals, long-distance telephone service, magazine subscriptions and other products."

The joke was on the sheriff's department, which, after the release was written up in the local paper and hit the national wires, was bombarded with phone calls about the story.

"I was working on several telemarketing scams that were going on here with our elderly," says Branch County detective Dan Nichols, who wrote the release. "In researching this, I came across this story. I didn't have a source on the story. I hadn't heard of The Onion. It appeared to me to be a legitimate news story, so I passed (it) along."

That's part of why The Onion's stories are so often taken for real news, says Kolb.

"I think that it has a lot to do with The Onion style," she says. "If we're doing our job right, we try to do it in a really straight, AP style. People aren't used to seeing their humor without a punch line."

To Nichols, the punch was in the gut.

"It felt like I'd been had," he remembers. "I was just kind of ticked off at myself for not verifying it before I passed it along, and not making sure it was satire. I have no problem with satire. I enjoy a good joke. I just hate it when it's on me."

It's not just detectives in small counties in Michigan who fall for Onion stories.

Kolb delights in how, last month, MSNBC reporter Deborah Norville went on air with news that more than half of all exercise done in the United States happens in TV infomercials for workout machines.

Norville neglected to mention her source: The Onion, of course. Norville did not return a call seeking comment.

Chris Taylor, the San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine, and a longtime Onion fan, says it shouldn't be difficult to tell that the publication is nothing but satire.

"If it wasn't, it would be chock-full of the biggest scoops in history," Taylor says. "As a true journalist, you have to be skeptical even about stories you see on the front page of The New York Times."

Many people who mistakenly believe Onion stories do so in part because the stories are e-mailed around endlessly, often to the point where the source is no longer clear. But Taylor doesn't think much of that as an excuse.

"Average readers do themselves no disservice if they're skeptical about every news story they read," he says, "fake or not."

And it seems that one reason many people fall for Onion stories is that they're too close to the subject matter to see humor in it.

"Some people are so desperate for proof of their point of view, they'll seize upon any old e-mail forward that floats by," Taylor said.

As an example, Kolb points to a 2000 story titled, "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism Among Children," which prompted some Christian groups to go nuts.

Indeed, an e-mail blasting Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling moved at light speed through fundamentalist groups online, decrying the books' satanic influence on children and Rowling's supposed pride at being behind it.

The e-mail further tried to whip up anti-Potter fury with the inclusion of an inflammatory Rowling quote from The Onion story.

"I think it's absolute rubbish to protest children's books on the grounds that they are luring children to Satan," Rowling was said to have told a London Times reporter. "People should be praising them for that! These books guide children to an understanding that the weak, idiotic Son of God is a living hoax who will be humiliated when the rain of fire comes, and will suck the greasy cock of the Dark Lord while we, his faithful servants, laugh and cavort in victory."

Kolb, of course, chuckles at the notion that anyone took the story seriously.

Then again, she says, after stories like "Chinese Woman Gives Birth to Septuplets: Has One Week to Choose" provoked prayer vigils on behalf of the six babies who would be tossed off a mountaintop, Kolb isn't surprised that The Onion gets regularly flooded with e-mails from people who didn't get the joke.

But Kolb says she and her staff don't write back.

"We don't respond to anyone, really, ever," she says. "We just laugh and laugh and laugh."